One thing at least the Strauss of the tone-poems indisputably was. He was freely, dazzlingly, daringly expressive. And this is what the Strauss of the last years thinly and rarely is. It is not Oscar Wilde's wax flowers of speech, nor the excessively stiff and conventionalized action of "Salome," that bores one with the Strauss opera of that name. It is not even the libretto of "Der Rosenkavalier," essentially coarse and boorish and insensitive as it is beneath all its powdered preciosity, that wearies one with Strauss's "Musical Comedy"; or the hybrid, lame, tasteless form of "Ariadne auf Naxos" that turns one against that little monstrosity. It is the generally inexpressive and insufficient music in which Strauss has vested them. The music of "Salome," for instance, is not even commensurable with Wilde's drama. It was the evacuation of an obsessive desire, the revulsion from a pitiless sensuality that the poet had intended to procure through this representation. But Strauss's music, save in such exceptional passages as the shimmering, restless, nerve-sick opening page, or the beginning of the scene with the head, or certain other crimson patches, hampers and even negates the intended effect. It emasculates the drama with its pervasive prettiness, its lazy felicitousness where it ought to be monstrous and terrifying, its reminiscences of Mendelssohn, Tchaikowsky and "Little Egypt." The lascivious and hieratic dance, the dance of the seven veils, is represented by a _valse lente_. Oftentimes the score verges perilously on circus-music, recalls the sideshows at county fairs. No doubt, in so doing it weakens the odor exuded by Wilde's play. But if we must have an operatic "Salome," it is but reasonable to demand that the composer in his music express the sexual cruelty and frenzy symbolized in the figure of the dancer. And the Salome of Strauss's score is as little the Salome of Wilde as she is the Salome of Flaubert or Beardsley or Moreau or Huysmans. One cannot help feeling her eminently a buxom, opulent Berliner, the wife, say, of the proprietor of a large department store; a heavy lady a good deal less "daemonisch" and "perverse" than she would like to have it appear. But there are moments when one feels as though Strauss's heroine were not even a Berliner, or of the upper middle class. There are moments when she is plainly Kaethi, the waitress at the Muenchner Hofbrauehaus. And though she declares to Jokanaan that "it is his mouth of which she is enamored," she delivers the words in her own true-hearted, unaffected brogue.